The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years - Christina Lamb

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      There was not much to do. Once we went on a crazy night-time raid on a government defence post in the centre of the city which involved us leaving the motorbikes in a flour-mill, tiptoeing past a Communist post so close that we could hear the radio inside, then hiding in the woodcutters’ bazaar until a signal was given at which everyone fired their weapons then fled back through the empty streets and along the ridges between irrigation canals.

      Mostly we did nothing. I became accustomed to sitting in Bor Jan’s garden writing my diary with bullets whizzing one side and rockets the other, and chatting to his men. When they were not cleaning their guns, clipping their nose-hairs or tending their beloved flowers, those that were literate would read the Koran. There was none of the hashish smoking I had encountered on previous trips though plenty of chewing – and spitting – of tobacco. I was provided with a Kalashnikov-wielding bodyguard, a solemn-faced nineteen-year-old called Abdul Wasei to stand in front of the door while I washed off my coating of dust in the bucket-shower, which after a week without washing, felt like a five-star bath. They even made me a bed, which was wonderful until I realised that I was sleeping on boxes of ammunition.

      Abdul Wasei, a nineteen-year-old former raisin cleaner who was my bodyguard.

      Ratmullah had found a little sparrow, which he tied by string to a multi-barrel rocket-launcher and it would jump around squawking. Some of the fighters amused themselves by firing their Kalashnikovs near it and betting how high it would jump.

      Ratmullah.

      One day Bor Jan told us we were going to attack the airport. The plan was to depart at dawn but we left in the late morning, about twenty of us, all on motorbikes. I sat behind Ratmullah, trying to balance without touching his body so as not to offend him and consequently almost falling off. It felt good finally to be outside the post until in a field of green corn we passed an abandoned tractor, the driver’s body hanging awkwardly over the side. His brains had been blown out.

      We hid the bikes in a branch-covered hole in a mulberry wood and, passing under a Koran held up by Ratmullah, we ran through the trees and down into one of the trenches that the mujaheddin had dug around the city. In the distance were some hills, beyond which was the airport. Some of the men took up position behind the trench in a tower used to dry grapes and began firing rockets at the airport, hoping to blow up a plane or an oil-tanker, though it seemed to me much too far away.

      A shout went up and I just caught the fleeting panic on Ratmullah’s usually serene face before he pulled me to the ground under his huge weight. Two Russian tanks had appeared on the crest of the hill and were rolling down towards us. There was a dull thud as one of them fired and the grape tower behind us went up in smoke. As hot dust and rubble rained down on us Abdul Wasei dragged me into a shelter dug into the side of the trench. We could hear the cries and whimpers of the wounded but there was nothing we could do. If we emerged from the trench, we would be shot.

      For two days we stayed there trapped while the tanks resolutely refused to go away. The cries behind us stopped and the silence was almost worse. We had nothing to eat or drink and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. There was a pool of muddy water in the trench and the others scooped it up with their hands and drank. Dead mosquitoes were floating on top but in the end I gulped down the dusty-tasting water, wryly remembering the British diplomat in Islamabad who had advised me ‘whatever you do, take your own cup to Afghanistan to avoid catching anything’. Ratmullah suddenly jabbered excitedly in Pashto, holding something up in his chubby hands. It was a mud-crab. I watched in horror as he bit into it, making noises of delight. Soon everyone was looking for mud-crabs and chewing them happily.

      Eating mud crabs in the trenches.

      Finally on the second day the tanks retreated back up the hill, presumably deciding we must all be dead. We ran crouching along the trench then out and back into the mulberry woods where our bikes were still where we had left them. When we got back to the post and were sitting drinking green tea, I put on my radio. After the usual crackle and static, I found BBC World Service and the unmistakable gravelly voice of Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World. It was one of those moments you know you will never forget. Exhilarated at still being alive, I asked Abdul Wasei if he was ever scared. He shook his head. ‘That would bring dishonour on my family. A coward running away will not be buried in Muslim rites. Instead he becomes a ghost so will never reach Paradise.’

      That night as it was our last dinner before leaving, we had rice with little bits of meat and bone, eaten scooped up in our hands. The next day, on the way back to Pakistan, I realised that the sparrow had disappeared.

      The more times I went into Afghanistan to cover the war the more I realised that there were many realities and the best I could hope for was a few fragments, never the big picture. But always within a few days of returning ‘outside’ to the comfort of Peshawar and the luxury of plentiful food and clean clothes, there would come an aching hollowness and I would spend all my time trying to get back inside. War was an addiction and I was badly hooked.

      ‘No foreign editor is worth dying for,’ said someone older and wiser who saw what was happening to me but I laughed, downed shots of the smuggled vodka we referred to as ‘Gorbachev’ and went swimming at midnight in the Pearl Continental pool to the outrage of the hotel management. The ragtag mujaheddin of the mountains with their plastic sandals and Lee Enfield rifles were defeating the powerful Red Army with all their tanks and helicopter gunships and these were glory days.

      That was before Jalalabad.

      Jalalabad was different. By then it was March 1989 and the Russians had finished withdrawing their troops from Afghanistan. After years of guerrilla warfare the pressure was on the mujaheddin to show that they could capture and control a town. ‘It’s time to fish or cut bait,’ said an American diplomat with a southern twang at the weekly ‘Sitrep’ and we knew it was battle on. Kabul was the ultimate prize, but snug in its nest of tall mountains, the city presented too difficult a target. So the royal winter capital of Jalalabad was chosen as it was only fifty-eight miles from the Pakistan border and thus logistically easy. There were no secrets in Peshawar though plenty of misinformation and rumour. Everyone knew that the Pakistani military advisors were working on a plan. We all wanted to be the first one there.

      One evening when I was in Islamabad the phone-call came. ‘It’s starting.’ Quickly I dressed in my mujaheddin gear of shalwar kamiz, rubbed permanganate powder mixed with earth into my skin to darken it, tucked my hair into a flat wool pakol cap, and wrapped a woollen shawl around my shoulders. By then, as a fully paid-up member of the War Junkies Club I also had a mud-spattered US army jacket. I grabbed my small rucksack and jumped into my little Suzuki car weaving my way though the camels and arms trucks up the Grand Trunk Road to Peshawar to meet with the group of guerrillas I was planning to travel with. They had bad news. The border had been closed by ISI and no journalists were to be allowed across.

      The commander was a friend and willing to take the risk so we left immediately, crammed in the back of a jeep, up the Khyber Pass, a twenty-five-mile journey through narrow gaps in craggy mountains decorated with pennants of the Khyber Rifles and other frontier forces familiar from British history. The mountains were barren and not spectacularly high but it was always a thrilling drive, recalling the various British misadventures starting in 1839 when British troops marched up here on the way to the First Afghan War which ended in disaster in 1842, and back again in 1878 for the Second when they were again forced to withdraw. Each time hundreds of men had been killed just getting through this pass, controlled then as now by the murderous Afridi tribe famous for smuggling and complete untrustworthiness. Many of these men were buried near the Masjid mosque at the top of the pass. Nearby, at the Torkham border post, ISI were out in large numbers. An officer jumped in the back and shone his torch

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